About the Conference

“After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity” is a one-day conference on money and metaphors to be held at the University of Virginia, October 31, 2009.

The current financial crisis has generated much concern and anxiety in academia and with the public at large about the viability and future of capitalism. Whether financial crises lead us to re-think our approaches to and ideas about money and the economy or simply reinforce previous paradigms and metaphorical models is, as yet, unclear.

We see the recent burst of the financial “bubble” as an opportunity to question the language of liquidity and flows employed in our basic models and metaphors for money. We hope to locate current talk of ”zombie banks,” “toxic assets,” and “financial weapons of mass destruction” in a wider context and longer history.